Many consumers receive entertainment programming in their homes from a cable television operator. Many of today's cable offerings are broadcast using digital signals, which make more efficient use of communication bandwidth, and thus allow more programming to be carried on the same cable. In these cable systems, video programming (e.g., television programs, movies, etc.) is encoded using a Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) standard, and encapsulated into an MPEG transport stream. The MPEG transport stream may be transmitted from a cable head-end to the customer premises by a number of subscriber delivery mechanisms, such as coax cable or hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) cable, or over twisted pair cable running a broadband technology such as digital subscriber loop (DSL). At the customer premises, a digital home communication terminal (DHCT) decodes the programming and generates an analog or digital picture signal. The picture is displayed by a television connected to the DHCT.
Video programming is delivered to the DHCT over a logical channel. Logical channels are also used to deliver other kinds of data, some of which is seen by the user (e.g., an electronic program guide), and some of which is not (e.g., system data such as entitlements and channel maps.) In some environments, a logical channel corresponds to a particular frequency. In other environments, a logical channel corresponds to a timeslot within a particular frequency. In other environments, a logical channel corresponds to a network unicast or broadcast address.
A DHCT, or group of DHCTs sharing the same subscriber connection, can receive multiple types of programs or data simultaneously, since each is carried in a separate logical channel. The set of logical channels received over the subscriber connection typically changes over time. Sometimes the change in the channels delivered to a subscriber is a result of direct channel changes by users. Other times, the channel change is indirect, resulting from requests made by the DHCT for various types of data (as described above) which are also carried over logical channels. Conventional DHCTs treat all types of channel changes in the same manner. However, it would be advantageous for different types of channel changes to be handled differently by the DHCT. Thus, a need arises for these and other problems to be addressed.